Humour and (mock) aggression: Distinguishing cyberbullying from roasting

Abstract

This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative (meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online community's original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (community members') and etic (outsiders') metapragmatic evaluations of the content on the subreddit yields divergent insider/outsider interpretations of the practice at hand; it also uncovers some ambivalence in the polysemous folk concepts of roasting and cyberbullying and the relationship between them. “Roasting” and “cyberbullying” are formally distinguished based on the intended form of aggression on which each relies. Also, the points of convergence between humour and aggression are surveyed. First, mock aggression underlies benevolent humour (typified by roasting proper); second, genuine aggression (exemplified by cyberbullying proper) may amuse individuals other than the target of discursive aggression.

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